Phone Preview: The Nokia N93 Phone is No Longer a Rumor

Wow. Barely a year since the Nokia N90 debuted and achieved fame for being the biggest, heaviest flip phone to date, Nokia has (officially) announced the N93. A weird sort of hybrid between the N90 and the European N92 phone, the N93 takes the best of both worlds with more Carl Zeiss optics powering a 3.2 megapixel camera and hinge mechanism mirroring the N92′s.

Read more in the extended entry.

The Nokia N93 Phone

The Nokia N93 phone is one of the three newest Nseries phones announced today (the others being the N72 and N73 multimedia phones). It’s a Series 60 triband (900/1800/1900) phone with 3G and WLAN/wi-fi support.

Nokia really pulled out all the stops on this phone. The camera’s what I would term “godly,” with the ability to take 3.2 megapixel (2048×1536 resolution) photos and record video at an impressive 30 frames per second. The N93 also sports 3x optical zoom, one of the first instances that we’ve seen on a Nokia phone, and image stabilization. It’s definitely nice to see that camera phones these days are starting to be comparable to digital cameras. Even built-in cameras on today’s cheap mobile phones can give low-end digicams a run for their money.

Here’s the biggest draw to the N93. A hinge that allows the screen to turn sideways, letting you watch videos in landscape mode without having to do some odd rotating a la the Nokia 6260. I should add that the internal screen supports 262k colors at a resolution of 320×240 (2.4 inches diagonal). For the external display, Nokia opted for a small, elegant color screen which I think is a huge plus.

Meanwhile, another “huh?” feature on the Nokia N93 is the ability to connect the phone directly to any tv. Apparently you can play games (huh?), use office applications, and etc on compatible televisions. No word on how this works.

As for expandable memory, the N93 phone uses miniSD up to 2 gigabytes. Nokia claims that this will hold 90 minutes of DVD-quality/30 fps video.

While Nokia has not released any kind of size information on the N93, from the pictures it looks similar in size to the N90 – with a couple more curves.

The Nokia N93 phone will retail for 550 euros, or $680 USD. Not as pricey as the N90, but still pretty far out of reach. Note that this is the retail price before phone “subsidies” or rebates.